REPORT 62 NOVEMBER 2007
Tim's more or less monthly blog since May 2003
I’m going to end these more-or-less-monthly ruminations . . .
THE MOST significant event of the past month was giving the eulogy at
Rosemary Crawshaw’s memorial service at the parish church in Golant a
little way up the Fowey River. For me that is! Full house, family in
the front pews, yours truly shaking like the proverbial jelly and
worrying that he’d knock over the rather flimsy-seeming lectern every
time he turned a page. It reminded me of motor-cycling down Park Lane
and getting in a panic about Hyde Park Corner. You knew it was coming,
there was no way out, but you had the gravest doubts about your
ability to negotiate the traffic maelstrom. It wasn’t as bad (quite)
as doing an address at the cremation of my former history teacher and
friend, Derek Jarrett at Bodmin. Everything was fine until the vicar
told me not to press any buttons. It had never occurred to me to press
a button or even that there were any buttons to be pressed. But I
realised as I read the eulogy that if I did slip and inadvertently
press something Derek might roll off in his coffin before he was due
to go.
It was a bit the same with dear Rosemary who, incidentally, Penny and
I both adored and who, I felt, was a quizzical if ethereal presence
throughout the service. Anyway I did it and was glad to have done so
but am disturbed to realise that it’s becoming more and more usual. We
have another funeral this afternoon and on reading our local paper I
realised with a shock that Walter Olsen had died earlier in the year.
We first met Walter when he was landlord at the Russell in Polruan
soon after we moved in and he was a wonderfully droll and supportive
figure in our first few Cornish months. He has been commemorated with
a memorial race at the Exeter autumn meeting. Fun, but no substitute
for having him around. The same with Rosemary. She was in her eighties
and she went quickly and peacefully but that doesn’t mean that we all
don’t miss her.
In London last week I kicked off with a memorial service for Bill
Deedes with whom I worked on the Peterborough column from 1972 until
he became editor of the Telegraph a few years later and I
started to write features for him. It was a fine service in the Guards
Chapel, followed by a serious champagne-fuelled bash in a tent
outside. Bill planned and paid for this, reasoning that otherwise
memorials could be rather “grim”. This wasn’t. It was like an
end-of-term party but then Bill was ninety-four and still writing his
weekly column up until a couple of days before his death. He was as
far as one could see almost universally loved and despite some great
sadnesses led a life fulfilled. Lucky man.
While away we learned that our favourite taxi-driver, Ray Curtis, had
died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was in his sixties and we used to
joke about high blood pressure and the pills we were both taking to
combat it. We also grumbled jovially about the pitfalls of
self-employment. He was a lovely fellow, keen smoker (apparently, I
never saw him puffing and the car never smelt of nicotine), and led a
life of terrifyingly erratic hours dashing up to Bristol airport,
transporting drunken seamen from Grimsby and Hull, taking them to
planes where the airline refused to accept them and occasionally
arguing the toss with celebrity passengers in the back seat. Jeremy
Paxman was one who came in for Ray’s rebukes. He thought he was unduly
rude to his guests on TV. I shall always think of Ray’s comforting
presence waiting to take me to the sleeper at Par or greeting me in
the dark hours of early morning with his familiar. “Hello, Tim Old
Pal”. My favourite moment in our acquaintance was a few years ago when
he drove us to the station to catch a train to London where Cornwall
were appearing in the final of the county rugby championship. Everyone
else was wearing yellow and black county favours but not me. Ray asked
me why and I explained that I wasn’t Cornish and never would be. He
grinned affably. “You’m Cornish now”, he exclaimed in his broad local
accent. Not true but possibly the nicest thing anyone has said to me
since we moved to Cornwall a dozen years ago.
It seems trivial, when surrounded by death, to be irritated by book
reviews. Also I keep being told that I am shooting myself in the foot
by appearing so on this site. All the same it is maddening to be told
that one’s biography of Princess Margaret contains “glaring errors”
even if it’s only in a local paper based in Darlington. Why do errors
always “glare” in certain quarters? And while I know that very few
people will notice I have visions of thousands of men and women in the
North Riding and Durham shaking their heads and muttering disparaging
things about my careless mistakes. A good reviewer, such as Hugh
Massingberd, identifies such errors; a bad one merely throws out a
scatter-gun insult. And then there was a review of “A Death on the
Ocean Wave” saying that she, the reviewer was “nauseated” because the
book was so “lightweight”. Strange, the things that make people sick,
and I wouldn’t have thought perceived lack of substance in a crime
novel should be one of them but even so. I was particularly annoyed
because this review was in the Oxford Times whose editor, once
upon a time, was Anthony Price, who wrote excellent, lean thrillers
which I much admired. But, hey, who cares? We’ll all be dead before
long.
We still have a painter in the house. He’s very good and conscientious
but what should have been a quick and easy little operation has now
been going on since we left for Australia at the beginning of July.
Alas it seems to be par for the course. Half Fowey is covered with
scaffolding and when one walks past the building sites one sees armies
of men in overalls and hard hats drinking tea and listening to very
loud portable radios. I must be exaggerating but it reinforces the
notion that there are an increasing number of people buying in to the
town with more money than sense.
I’ve been deliberating about blogs and blogging and woke in the middle
of the night thinking that I seemed to be focussing an awful lot on
death and complaint. I also pondered the increasing raucousness of the
blogosphere. Whereas old-fashioned print used to be, on the whole,
reasonably measured and polite; bloggers seem to be more and more
shrill and love unsubstantiated rants. I came across a stream of abuse
on one site about the piece I wrote in the Spectator on Sydney.
It wasn’t just the ignorance which was depressing, it was the venom.
It reminded me of the remark Antonia Fraser once made surveying an
apparently benign assembly of crime writers at a meeting in London.
She warned me not to be fooled for behind those smiling faces, she
explained, “they seethe”. She was not far wrong and one of the things
that depresses me about the modern world is that there seems to be so
much seething. Hatred is in the ascendancy. Everyone seems to be
angry. Everywhere seems to be wall-to-wall shrieking profanities at
everyone and no-one.
With this in mind I wondered whether I should change the nature of my
blogs. The present one is, after all, the sixty-second, and I have
been writing them since May 2003. That’s over four years and around
100,000 words. No publisher has picked up on my (excellent!) idea for
a book based on them and they seem to be making some people
increasingly cross. Also I find myself more and more inclined to edit
them according to what I think people want or don’t want to read. And
at the back of my mind I hear that adage of George Bernard Shaw’s that
Derek Marks used to quote back at the Express: “Someone who
writes for himself has a fool for an editor”. Or words to that effect.
Even worse than having one’s self as an editor is being edited by
one’s public.
So I think I’m going to end these more-or-less-monthly ruminations and
move to something sharper, more newsy and probably more frequent. I
hope it won’t seem too anodyne. I’ll plot it in collusion with the
trusty web-site organiser John Bennett who agrees with me, that for
whatever reason, the occasional review is no bad thing. I’ve enjoyed
writing the blogs in their present form over the last few years and
I’d like to thank those who have been loyal to them and who have also
enjoyed them. At the same time I’m sorry that I caused offence to some
people. I certainly haven’t set out to be deliberately critical let
alone to betray confidences but I’m well aware that there are problems
in being honest about real life. A case in point are the letters of my
former tutor and friend Richard Cobb. He wrote wonderful letters and
we discussed the possibility of publishing them. He was quite happy
with the idea but some of his correspondents aren’t and I do
understand that letters such as his are or were private and
confidential. On the other hand they are terrifically entertaining and
I think Richard, who never kept a diary, always had one eye on their
eventual publication.
It’s a tough one. As a journalist I have often found myself in a
dilemma. Part of one’s job is to get people to tell you things that
would otherwise remain private but which are interesting or
entertaining. Sometimes when I do this successfully and perfectly
fairly another part of me is unprofessionally horrified and wants to
warn the person I’m interviewing to shut up and not give away any more
secrets. And yet I’m only doing my job. It’s a tough one and I don’t
think outsiders (or many bloggers) understand the constant need for
the good journalist to balance professionalism and humanity.
Anyway from now on it will be different. I may well revert to a
previous and sporadic habit and start keeping a private diary
containing innermost thoughts and hostile opinions but the stuff I
post on the internet will be different. I hope you enjoy it and
continue to read.
But it’s time for a change.
Tim Heald
